Will Steve Bannon's Holy War Become Real War?

In his documentary, Generation Zero, Steve Bannon reveals the theory that guides his thinking: a notion of generational disruptions popularized by Neil Howe and William Strauss in "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy." According to Strauss and Howe, roughly every 80 years -- a saeculum, or the average life-span of a person -- America goes through a cataclysmic crisis. The Revolution of 1776, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II. Then comes the "unraveling," as the old order falls apart

Will Steve Bannon's Holy War Become Real War?Bill Berkowitz / for Buzzflash at TruthOut

(February 10, 2017) -- Just as Karl Rove was often referred to as President George W. Bush's brain, Steven K. Bannon just may be President Donald Trump's brain on steroids. Were President Donald Trump's executive order, "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States" -- aka the Muslim ban -- and the naming of Bannon, his chief strategist, to the National Security Council, indicative of the first stages of a holy war against Islam?

As The Washington Post's Frances Stead Sellers and David A. Fahrenthold recently pointed out, "Bannon's past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart and other conservative platforms, serve as a road map for the controversial agenda that has roiled Washington and shaken the global order during Trump's first two weeks in office."

In 2014, before Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker, who at the time was the proprietor of the incendiary white-nationalist Brietbart News, became a household name as Trump's chief political strategist, he told a Vatican-held Christian conference audience that: "We're now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism."

Speaking at the International Conference on Human Dignity -- the third annual meeting organized by the Rome-based Christian organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute – via Skype, Bannon told the gathering: "We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years."

Bannon extolled the virtues of capitalism: "I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs; I went to Harvard Business School. I'm as hard-nosed a capitalist as you can get," he explained.

He criticized the libertarianism of figures like Ayn Rand, however, for "taking away from the underlying spiritual, moral foundations of Christianity and really Judeo-Christian belief." He added, "That form of capitalism is quite different, when you really look at it, to what I call the enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West."

According to Alternet's Ben Norton, "The Dignitatis Humanae Institute is a religious group that advocates for 'the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square.' It promotes what it calls 'authentic human dignity' by, in its words, 'supporting Christians in public life, assisting them in presenting effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square.'"

Bannon has called the group's founder Benjamin Harnwell, a longtime aide to Conservative member of the European Parliament Nirj Deva, "the smartest guy in Rome" and "a very tough guy."

BuzzFeed's J. Lester Feder pointed out that The Dignitatis Humanae Institute "has ties to some of the most conservative factions inside the Catholic Church; Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the most vocal critics of Pope Francis, who was ousted from a senior Vatican position in 2014, is chair of the group's advisory board."

At the time of the speech, Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart and an influential media figure on the far right, had little standing within government circles. Now, all that has changed.

As Haaretz correspondent Bradley Burston posited earlier this month, "Not only does it [the Vatican speech] predict the imminence and inevitability of a war pitting Christianity against Islam, it obliquely suggests that Jews could find themselves a target for US Christian anger somewhere down the road."

Bannon said that when he worked for Goldman Sachs, he understood that "there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they're going to dictate to everybody how the world's going to be run."

In response to a question about the 2014 Republican primary defeat of then-House majority leader Eric Cantor -- at the time, the sole Jewish Republican in either the House or Senate -- Bannon said the defeat was "monumental" and "the biggest election upset in the history of the American republic."

He pointed out that it the Tea Party candidate David Brat -- whom he did not name -- is an evangelical Christian. "And the reason that this guy won," Bannon said, "is quite simple: Middle-class people and working-class people are tired of people like Eric Cantor who say they're conservative, selling out their interests every day to crony capitalists."

After you put his white supremacist-sympathizing views aside, perhaps the most troublesome thing about Bannon, who is a navy veteran, is his apparent obsession with warfare. According to The Daily Beast's Asawin Suebsaeng, people who have known him for years describe him as "a man almost obsessed with military history, guerilla warfare, and the general art of war and nationalist foreign policy."

"He constantly used military terms, used military terms to describe people who worked for him . . . like, 'grunts,'" one former Breitbart staffer told Suebsaeng. "He always spoke in terms of aggression. It was always on-the-attack, double down... macho stuff. Steve has an obsession with testosterone."

"Steve is a strong militarist, he's in love with war -- it's almost poetry to him," Julia Jones, Bannon's longtime Hollywood writing partner and former close friend, told The Daily Beast in an interview last year, well before Trump won the election and Bannon landed his new job. "He's studied it down through the ages, from Greece, through Rome... every battle, every war . . . Never back down, never apologize, never show weakness . . . He lives in a world where it's always high noon at the O.K. Corral."

There is no question that Bannon has earned Trump's loyalty, and is now at the center of power in the White House. How Bannon's white supremacist, Christian nationalist views, his obsession with military strategy and tactics, and his favoring of muscular action in dealing with Islamist terror networks will play itself out is still unclear. What does seem clear, however, is at this point is that there are few if any Trump staffers who can control him.

(April 17, 2010) -- Stephen K. Bannon speaking at the Tax Day Tea Party held by TeaParty365, in New York City, April 15th, 2010.

(February 8, 2017) -- What does Stephen Bannon really believe? Because he hasn't spoken much in public since becoming, as Time magazine puts it, "the Second Most Powerful Man in the World" -- he's the president's influential chief strategist and now a member of the National Security Council's principals committee -- analysts have focused in recent weeks on two main sources as clues to his thinking.

The first is a speech he gave via Skype in 2014 to a conference inside the Vatican, where he called on "the church militant" to fight against the "new barbarity" of "jihadist Islamic fascism," and praised the Tea Party movement as the leading edge of a "center-right revolt" against crony capitalists and the "party of Davos."

"There is a major war brewing, a war that is already global," he declared in the speech, the transcript of which was helpfully published by Buzzfeed. "Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn't act."

A second source of Bannon's thinking, mined most recently by reporters at USA Today and The New York Times, have been his comments on a daily radio show he ran as part of his Breitbart News empire until taking over the reins of Trump's presidential campaign last summer.

In these programs, Bannon's ideas often appear as the premises for questions that he poses to his interviewees. For example, in March 2016, he asked author Lee Edwards, "We're going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years, aren't we?"

Talking to his Breitbart colleague Thomas Williams, he made reference to "an expansionist Islam," "an expansionist China," and a "Judeo-Christian West on the retreat." In December 2015, he told anti-immigrant activist Rosemary Jenks that "most people in the Middle East, at least 50 percent, believe in being Sharia-compliant" and that for those people "the United States is the wrong place for you."

These statements tell us much about what Bannon believes, but to form a complete understanding of his worldview -- if you want to understand why he has such a dark appraisal of the world and where he wants to take the United States -- turn to his work as a documentary filmmaker.

Before he joined Breitbart News as a founding member of its board, Bannon made several documentaries as both producer and chief writer, including In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed (2004), Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman and Battle for America (both 2010), The Undefeated (about Sarah Palin, from 2011), and Occupy Unmasked (2012), a piece of agitprop that tried to defame the Occupy movement as a conspiracy spawned by groups as disparate as the Earth Liberation Front and the Black Panther Party. [See trailers for the films below -- EAW.]

As their titles suggest, most of these films are hymns to the Republican idols of Reagan, Palin, and the Tea Party, or attacks on the left. But there is one Bannon production that deserves more attention for what it explains about his underlying worldview: his 2010 movie Generation Zero.

In 90 minutes of often lurid images from the last hundred years of world history, interspersed with interviews with a seemingly never-ending array of conservative intellectuals, nearly all of them white men, Bannon's script offers a coherent and hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism.

The films centers on the banking collapse of 2008, pivoting backward and forward in time to offer an explanation for its cause and to dramatize its effects. Bannon opens with the hapless House Financial Services committee member Paul Kanjorski being berated on C-Span by an angry taxpayer and Kanjorski admitting his lack of financial acumen; meanwhile, images of nuclear bombs exploding and planes crashing punctuate the narration.

Whom does Bannon blame for the financial collapse? "A toxic combination of big government in bed with Wall Street" birthed by the permissive culture of the 1960s. But this permissive culture itself, Bannon posits, was generated by a prior generation that was traumatized by the slaughter of World War II, and thus shielded its children from the harsh realities of the world, producing their lax moral standards and self-centeredness.

To Bannon, and the parade of conservatives he marshals to make his case (Newt Gingrich, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball, Michael Novak, and Shelby Steele all get lots of face time), the rebellions of the 1960s were all rooted in the baby-boom generation's narcissism. Not once do racism or the Vietnam War appear as possible causes for mass movements for social change or human liberation.

Instead, the left -- represented by organizer Saul Alinsky and academics Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward -- is blamed for manipulating the children of the 1960s into believing that American society was evil and that disruption of the status quo was moral. Only if you ignore the proximate causes of protest, like racism or war, can you make this sort of intellectual leap. But Bannon is just warming up.

One quarter of the way into Generation Zero, the filmmaker unveils the deeper theory that guides his thinking: the notion of generational turnings popularized by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their books Generations: The History of America's Future (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997).

According to Strauss and Howe, roughly every 80 years -- a saeculum, or the average life-span of a person -- America goes through a cataclysmic crisis.

Marked by savagery and genocide, and lasting a decade or more, this crisis ends with a reset of the social order and its survivors all vowing never to let such a catastrophe happen again. Each of these crises, Strauss and Howe posit, have been formative moments in our nation's history. The Revolution of 1776–83, followed roughly 80 years later by the Civil War, followed 80 years after that by the Great Depression and World War II.

Inside each 80-year saeculum, Howe and Strauss argue, there are four turnings, each a generation long, and each as inevitable as the coming of the seasons. In the first turning, for the generation that survives the prior catastrophe, the newly restored society reaches a collective apex of social order and economic power. Think of America in the post-war boom of 1945 to 1965.

Then comes the awakening, as the first new generation of post-catastrophe children enter adulthood and, unlike their traumatized parents, let loose with their emotions and take risks that their forebears would never have imagined. Hello to the long 1960s.

Then comes the unraveling, as the once robust order starts to fall apart, people question the eternal verities and institutions weaken. The fourth turning is kicked off and punctuated by ongoing crises, out of which a whole new order is born.

Strauss and Howe are essentially pop historians -- there's just enough in their framework to make it seem compelling, but nothing that you can prove or disprove with any assurance.

But that doesn't bother Bannon. Having established this seductive narrative framework, Bannon devotes the rest of Generation Zero to bearing down relentlessly on the decades of the unraveling, which in his mind are the years from 1987 to 2007.

As a propagandist, he has two purposes. The first is to make his viewers clearly understand who are the victimizers and who are the victims; the second is to use that framing to help shape the new societal order that will come, as he believes, after the fourth turning plays itself out.

To convince his audience that liberals and hippies are to blame for the financial depredations of the last 20 years, Bannon trots out conservative economists like Amity Schlaes and Arthur Brooks, who have long argued that the New Deal didn't save the American economy but simply entrenched big government and made it an enemy of the hard-working entrepreneur -- or, as Schlaes phrases it, anticipating Trump, "the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of, the forgotten man."

The economic crisis of 2008 didn't happen because of the massive deregulatory push of the 1980s and 1990s, Generation Zero suggests; it happened because big government and big business got in bed together, and the establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties became the "Party of Davos."

Bannon has a point. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, there was a Washington consensus in favor of globalization, free trade, deregulation of Wall Street, and the financialization of the economy.

But Bannon, as we know, isn't just an economic populist. He is also a racist, which leads him, in the next part of the "unraveling" narrative, to blame the housing bubble and the sub-prime loan crisis on the civil-rights movement and efforts to address redlining.

Because "white Americans have been in a position where they constantly have to prove that they are not racist. It is that phenomenon of white guilt is what pressures people in the government to say things like 'everybody has a right to a house,'" his narrator opines.

Banks supposedly loosened their standards for loans because of the Community Reinvestment Act and ACORN, but "unfortunately capitalism doesn't work that way," and thus the crash of 2008 was the fault of liberals and blacks.

Bannon ends Generation Zero with both a warning and a hint of hope: "When you get into a crisis era, literally anything can happen. The restraints come down. These are the eras of revolution. These are the eras of reigns of terror," his narrator says. But "the question of what the new order will be is up to us."

In a Time magazine article published shortly after November's election, David Kaiser explains why this is so chilling. Bannon had sought to interview him for Generation Zero because he is one of the few professional historians who have taken Howe and Strauss's work seriously.

As he writes, "My own interpretation of [their work] is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place." The Republican Party, he says, has such a vision, while the Democrats have been more concerned with protecting the achievements of the New Deal.

But Bannon, Kaiser says, had more on his mind than merely rolling back the legacies of Democratic presidents from Barack Obama to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. He writes:

Bannon had clearly thought a long time both about the domestic potential and the foreign policy implications of Strauss and Howe. More than once during our interview, he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War.

He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect. I did not agree, and said so. But, knowing that the history of international conflict was my own specialty, he repeatedly pressed me to say we could expect a conflict at least as big as the Second World War in the near or medium term. I refused.

Bannon doesn't just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China. It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war. As a believer in Strauss and Howe's theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order. He is now in a position to make that a reality.

Occupy Unmasked

(February 13, 2012) -- The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. "Occupy Unmasked" goes deep into the "Occupy" movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind "income inequality" that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort

In the Face of Evil:
Ronald Reagan's War in Word and Deed

Fire From The Heartland Trailer

(September 17, 2010) -- The first-ever film to tell the entire story of the conservative woman in her own words, "Fire from the Heartland" is a powerful statement about America at a crossroads and the women who have awakened to the crisis. With role models such as Clare Boothe Luce, Margaret Thatcher, and Phyllis Schlafly as inspiration, these women are the unintended consequence of the liberal feminist movement. http://www.FireFromTheHeartland.com

Battle For America

(September 20, 2010) -- A call to action by Dick Morris to take back our country, "The Battle for America" is a searing look at the ongoing conflict between "Constitutional Conservatives" and an out-of-touch, arrogant, and ever-expanding central government.